A single IT platform for a 24x7 worldwide outsourced customer service and support operation

Product and service differentiation in the very competitive outsourcing business to help ContactWorks win more business

Increased technical creditability with prospects

Expertise in customer service "best practices" to help win outsourcing contracts

A highly configurable system that allows ContactWorks to provide a custom solution to each of its clients

Rich graphical views of data with Dashboards, Charts, and Metrics to allow customers to quickly focus on priorities

In the end, we determined that Giva is a superior product for its Dashboards, Reports and easy customization and brings much value in ease of use and rapid deployment.

Giva worked closely with our business development team to teach us how to customize Giva which helped us win new outsourcing contracts.

Giva's product line, knowledge and expertise have also enabled us to significantly differentiate our service offering from our competitors, resulting in winning more outsourcing contracts.

Tom Sultenfuss,
President, ContactWorks

The Challenge

By Tom Sultenfuss
President

Lisa Flournoy
Director of Quality & Program Management

ContactWorks personnel have worked in the customer service and call center outsourcing business for over 30 years. We run a 24x7 call center in the USA and have call center partners in Mexico, Panama, India and the Philippines. We were looking for customer service software that could span multiple client databases within a single login architecture so that our agents all over the world could quickly handle customer support calls from multiple clients using a single IT platform. As with most call centers, we leverage our agents across multiple clients to provide the most cost effective services. We wanted our agents to be able to quickly log calls from different clients with an absolute minimum of effort as our clients pay for our services by the number of calls or by the minute. When searching for a customer support software solution, we needed to consider how the application would reduce hold times and abandon rates. We also needed highly granular reporting so that we could prepare monthly reports for each client quickly, efficiently, and in the most cost-effective manner. Since some service requests are escalated directly to our clients, we needed a support solution that could easily be accessed anywhere in the world without having to purchase, install, configure and maintain our own IT hardware and software infrastructure.

The Solution

We started working with Giva in 2007 to understand their customer service and call center support products. Often our clients look to us for recommendations for "best in class" customer service applications, so we consistently maintain an expert understanding of the current industry offerings. In addition to Giva, we evaluated a number of alternatives in the customer service and support software market including RightNow® Technologies, Front Range Solutions CRM & HEAT,® Salesforce.com® CRM Customer Service, Parature® Customer Service and Numara Footprints® and Track It!®. In the end, we determined that Giva is a superior product for its Dashboards, Reports and easy customization and brings much value in ease of use and rapid deployment.

Most of the other customer support software alternatives were more suited for a single company supporting a group of related customers, whereas Giva naturally supports the need to support multiple clients. Through configuring the Giva call center software for many prospects, we learned that Giva is extremely customizable and easy to use for a Cloud Computing Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) approach, as compared to all the other SaaS and client/server vendors. These qualities really set Giva apart.

Further, all of the other customer support and call center software applications lacked in their ability to easily and quickly analyze and present the large amounts of granular data we need for our reporting. With Giva, we could report on the data in the ways our clients and also our internal operations needed to report.

Lastly, as a concerned and dedicated business partner, Giva worked closely with our business development team to teach us how to customize Giva which helped us win new outsourcing contracts.

Results

Giva is more of a business partner than just a
software vendor and is an expert on customer service "best practices." We work jointly with them to collaborate and understand the requirements of our customers and prepare demonstrations and proofs of concept to solve business problems. Since we provide outsourced call center services, our customers expect a lot of personal attention. Giva provides us with expertise, and outstanding service and support, which helps us keep our customers very satisfied.

We have call center partners all over the world that enable us to share call volume. Any of our customer support agents can log into Giva's SaaS based Cloud Computing platform from anywhere in the world and access the call center software. In addition, client personnel can log into Giva's application and handle calls that are escalated to them and monitor our work using Giva's Dashboards, Charts and Metrics. They can also run customized reports of their own design, which saves them money and us labor hours.

Our clients are not only very satisfied with our service because of Giva, but Giva's product line, knowledge and expertise have also enabled us to significantly differentiate our service offering from our competitors, resulting in winning more outsourcing contracts.

One of the reasons we chose to partner with Giva was the fact that their SaaS customer service software is very customizable—even more customizable than software costing orders of magnitude more. Giva can meet a wide range of customer service and call center software requirements, including small, medium and large clients. Since 2007, we have engaged with dozens of customers and have always been able to customize Giva's applications to meet the customer needs. Further, it is easy and fast to train our agents and customers to use Giva since the interface and general customization is very intuitive. Giva's call center software allows us to serve more customers on a common platform, which ultimately reduces costs and simplifies our operations.

Giva has a strong track record of continued R&D investments in their Cloud Computing SaaS product line as we have seen major upgrades since 2007. Also, our experience with Giva's own customer service and technical support has been exceptional.

Another unique and beneficial characteristic of Giva's expertise and customer support is that they monitor our configuration and customization of their software, and they provide proactive advice and guidance on how to better utilize its features and capabilities. No other software vendors provide this value added service. We have an excellent business partnership with Giva.